Posts Tagged ‘crime’

[Editor’s note: Series of maps showing twitter tweet density in New York, London, Paris and Munich (some but not all tweets are tagged with geographic coordinates) with hypsometric tints, contours, and placenames (with some literary license). A little more refined than those San Francisco crime maps floating around earlier this month. Thanks Andy!]

Over the past few months we have been harvesting geospatial data from Twitter with the aim of creating a series of new city maps based on Twitter data. Via a radius of 30km around New York, London, Paris, Munich we have collated the number of Tweets and created our New City Landscape Maps.

[Editor's note: When data lacks precision, don't zoom in past it's accuracy, yo. In Washington, DC, we often receive crime statistics located at the block level. A single point could represent any of a couple dozen to hundreds of housing units on a certain street block. The symbol either needs to show the fuzziness, or the map should not zoom in to a level where a symbol becomes associated with a specific property unless it is spot on. Datum issues, where a hundred feed offset can put the dot, even when using high precision, on the wrong side of the street further complicate the issue.]

I’ve asked it before but its worth repeating … with all the recent advances in spatial data publishing, where are the advances in metadata and data quality assurance? How do you know where the data comes from, what’s been done to it and by whom? What is the intended use of the data? For the vast majority of the data being shoved out onto the web, these bits of metadata are sorely lacking.

Of course this case is more a matter of one person’s sheer stupidity; I’m not sure any caveats in the metadata would have stopped the wrecking ball!

[Editor’s note: Instead of screen scrapping police logs printed in community papers, web mappers are partnering directly with city police departments to get timely, accurate reports up online in map form. Thanks Yifang!]

Republished from the Wall Street Journal. June 3, 2009. By BOBBY WHITE

When a burglar broke into a home on the outskirts of Riverdale Park, Md., last month, some locals quickly received an email alert about the incident. Once police confirmed the crime on the scene, they followed
up with a more thorough email disclosing the time, location and type of crime.

The alert is part of a crime-information service that the Riverdale Park police department provides its residents about illegal activity in their neighborhoods. “It helps us keep the public informed,” says Teresa Chambers, police chief of Riverdale Park, a suburb of Washington, D.C. “It’s also a way for us to solicit help [from residents] in solving some of these crimes.”

Across the country, Americans can increasingly track crime trends block by block as more police departments contract with Internet-based crime-mapping services. Since 2007, more than 800 police departments have begun working with Web sites like CrimeMapping.com, CrimeReports.com and EveryBlock.com. The services take live feeds from police record-keeping systems and automatically post the data on their sites.

Police say they use the sites to help change citizens’ behavior toward crime and encourage dialogue with communities so that more people might offer tips or leads. Some of the sites have crime-report blogs that examine activity in different locales. They also allow residents to offer tips and report crimes under way.

Police have traditionally depended on media reports and community meetings to inform the public about neighborhood crime. Many departments have been reluctant to share too much information with the public out of concern it could be used as a political tool, says Thomas Casady, police chief of Lincoln, Neb. But the rise of Web services that publish records online has forced some of the departments to reconsider. Some of these sites operate independently of the police department, putting pressure on police to participate, Mr. Casady says.

I came across this nifty professional mashup while looking up a council resolution on my city’s website. CrimeReports.com works with police departments across the US to aggregate crime reports. Please note they only show crimes for the jurisdictions that are subscribed to this service (so in my case the county police reports are showing, but that doesn’t cover all crimes committed in my city). You can even get customized “Crime Alerts” for your neighborhood. They have neat filtering options for Sorting the crimes, Filtering by Date range, and some Location options. Their interface for this the best designed, most compact I’ve seen. Overlapping markers are merged into a marker set. The mashup response is fairly quick, especially considering this is done in the Google Maps JavaScript API. They also have nifty analysis charting options to see trends in the data.